


Worth Fighting For

by Nyxierose



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: End of the World, F/M, Post-Canon, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-25
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-04-17 06:27:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4656114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyxierose/pseuds/Nyxierose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“She’s eight months pregnant and you’re going to war.”</p><p>Or, in which the universe once again tries and fails to break one of the most resilient humans it ever created.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worth Fighting For

**Author's Note:**

> Potential winner for weirdest *necessary* tags? I think yes.

The likely end of the world begins on a cold day in early spring. You’ve known it would happen for weeks now, tried to be calm about it because otherwise your partner will go off like she normally does in a crisis and that is the  _last_  thing you need, but when it finally happens, you’re not ready. No one ever is, you tell yourself, but the last six months have been… not the great buildup to war that might make this all make a little more sense than it does. No, there’ve been a few missions but now suddenly there’s one final chance and there are no choices left to be had. Those who can fight - a description being applied very loosely, you can’t help thinking as you look at what’s left of the community here - are going. Those who can’t consist of one medic, everyone under the age of fourteen, a few people with serious physical issues… and your partner. It’s that last detail that worries you.

You’re not worried for her, or at least you’re trying not to be. One of the things you love best about Octavia, one of the things you admire about her, is her innate resilience. She’s strong, she could survive anything the world throws at her, gods know she’s already worked her way through a good portion of the current possibilities. But she’s eight months pregnant, and you’re going to war, and you can’t shake the fear that this will be the last you ever see of her. That the last mental image you ever have of her will be her shaking body, the rest of her made even smaller than usual by her swollen abdomen, after she gives you one last kiss. That the last mental image she’ll ever have of you will be of your face painted for the first time in over a year, your sword on your back, sadness in every part of you. This is not how your story was supposed to end, but apparently evil AIs wait for no lovers.

You’ve never trusted technology, and you’re not about to start anytime soon. You’ve accepted some of the creature comforts that come with your current allegiance - you’re still not sure what their medics do but some of it is beyond your wildest dreams, and the heating system half of them described as substandard was still  _incredible_  through this last awful winter - but that does not equal trust. In the grand scheme of things, you are not remotely surprised that it’s tech gone awry that’s trying to end the world a second time. You’ve said as much whenever you’ve had the opportunity, and a year ago you were in favor of trying to find the origin and blow it to kingdom come. No one really listened to you then, and you wouldn’t be surprised if some of them regret that choice now. Their loss, their imminent funeral.

It’s easy to fade into the background on the trip. Your knowledge of the terrain has become decidedly less valuable and rare, and by the time you reach somewhere unfamiliar, you’re about as lost as anyone else. At the edge of the end of the world, you are simply another disposable body with a weapon, and you’re not sure how you ought to feel about that.

If there’s a difference between you and the others, it’s that none of them are preoccupied by their love for someone left behind. You study them when camp is made on the third night, watching their ways of dealing with what they do have. You watch the two boys who’ve practically been one being since the events of the Mountain; the girl who’s technically on watch but is a little too preoccupied making eyes at her girlfriend on the far side of the fire; the leader who has lost all she had, a lover and a child dead in the same attack; your own brother-in-law, who sits next to you with a look on his face that’s usually your cue to find other space. Usually, but not tonight.

“If it’s between you and me, I choose you,” he says, glancing away for a heartbeat.

“What do you mean?” you ask.

“She needs you more than she needs me. If only one of us makes it back to whatever the hell is even there, if  _any_  of us survive this, it ought to be you.”

You’ve had variations on this conversation with Bellamy at least once a month since he stopped actively wanting to kill you (you’re pretty sure the latent desire is still there but he didn’t even  _try_  when he found out about Octavia’s pregnancy so you suspect he’s mostly moved on), and it annoys you to no end. Yes, you have played a very important role in that woman’s blossoming, but  _you’re not the only one_  and you’d never be vain enough to say otherwise. She needs community, to be surrounded by people who  _see_  her. To be alone, as you have been and as your soul sometimes wants to be again, would probably kill her.

“If either of us dies, she’ll fight her way to the afterlife and yell at us.”

“She  _would_.”

As the trip continues, the days beginning to blend together, a plan is revealed and assignments given. Yours, unsurprisingly, is to help lead the physical force of it. “People listen to you,” someone says. “Plus, you’re damn hard to lose.”

(You think of your partner, deceptively small and fiery, and hope the child takes after you. It’ll break her heart if it does, and you know it’s a bit fatalist to even consider the idea, but she needs something to fight for and a little creature with your dark eyes and bad habit of internalizing everything would sufficiently fill that role. Then again, if you know Octavia even half as well as you want to think you do, she’ll be the fierce sort of mother regardless of anything. You only wish you could see it.)

Out of the thirty people they give you, you reckon maybe five of them have ever had any desire to fight. Those, you’re not worried about. The rest, you memorize names because you have no great hope for them. Of the hundred and thirty people who made this trip, the small remains of a civilization, you’d be amazed if twenty survive and most of those won’t be fighters at all. The physical battle is merely a front for the _real_  plan, some sort of technological shutdown that you intentionally don’t understand. You, and the others in your group and the two other sections like it, are disposable bodies. You acknowledge your fate, you accept it, but that doesn’t mean you  _like_  it.

(The night before, as everyone around you does what they need to do in preparation and possibly on the last night of their lives, you let yourself drown in memories of your love. The sweet softness of her body, her courage and protectiveness, her unquestioning faith in you, and the tiny human forming inside her. This is why you fight, so that they may have a chance to truly live.)

(You can’t help wondering if the child has been born yet. It’s been over two weeks since you left, and she seemed convinced it would happen early. You hope the both of them survive.)

Morning comes. As you sheath your weapon, you murmur a silent prayer for those who are meant to survive this day but you do not dare include yourself in that number. You will die in this place, you will die with all you care about hundreds of miles away, you will die and it will be every bit as sacrificial as you’ve feared since you were old enough to know what death even was, you will die but the world will go on and your last thought will be of a girl with piercing hazel eyes and a hopeful smile on her lips. You don’t dare let yourself hope for anything more than this tragic fate.

If nothing else, you are brave. You are not fighting actual physical beings, they told you; instead, you face projections. Different, harder to stop, but it’s doable. In theory, it’s doable. When the shutdown is complete, the projections will supposedly cease, but until then you need to help them buy as much time as you can. Oh, and the projections can definitely kill. If there’s a way this scenario could get worse, you’re not seeing it.

Your section forms a strategy, twos and threes against individual projections. You are lucky enough to have three of the original Hundred, your partner’s brethren, and they in particular are good at outsmarting the system. They, you know, will survive. The woman you team with, middle-aged and probably never held a weapon before two months ago, has good odds. Still, you do not hope for yourself.

You whirl around, trying to stab, but the projection you’re fighting makes a similar move against you first and then everything goes to black. Yet it is not death. You have died before, on a cold metal floor with a painful drug overwhelming your body, and this is nothing like that. There isn’t the same damning finality to it, and the only similarity is that the last thing you see before your brain stops is your partner’s breaking form. A memory, this time, but made even more painful by that detail. And then it all stops entirely.

The next conscious moment of your life, you are gasping for breath in an improvised medical tent. You’re not sure what you expected, but this is not it and it makes you worry more, makes your pulse race and your lungs hurt until someone pushes you back down.

“We won,” the unfamiliar woman says. You swear she wasn’t with the group that set out, and she’s painted similarly to others you’ve seen in the past. Perhaps the Northern Cluster finally learned to make war.

“How many dead?” And how likely is it that one of them is my half-heart’s reckless blood, you don’t quite manage to ask.

“Twenty-seven. Much less than I’m told your former leader expected. We came after, missed all the fun but the man running things said we could aid in the aftermath if we wished. And to find one of our own in such a place… even we heard the stories of the lovers’ compromise, but we thought they were  _stories_. Although I suppose the girl is-”

“She’s alive,” you breathe. “She’s alive, or at least she was three weeks ago.”

“Then why did she not fight alongside you? The stories we heard, the things you two were capable of…”

“Because she is not alone in her body.”

The woman nods knowingly. “Then you’re either very brave or very stupid for leaving her. I hope she lets you decide which.”

It’s another few days before your group begins the journey back. There are bodies to be dealt with, supplies to be gathered, wounds to heal. One more person, a girl of fifteen, dies from complications of her injuries on your second day towards home. Thus, another day is lost to honor and bury her. But from there, the days blur together. The closer you get, the longer the nights seem and the more hopeful the days. You survived. You  _survived_ , and you have something worth returning to.

When you first see a familiar place, your heart skips a beat. It’s a matter of days now, perhaps even _hours_  until you are whole again.

As expected, she is the first to see the returned. As expected, she runs towards you, and you barely process the small creature in a sling on her back before your arms are full of crying woman and it’s all you can do to keep from breaking just as hard. A miracle has happened, you have returned mostly unscathed, and your partner is in similarly good condition. All is right with the world.

“I knew you’d come back to me,” Octavia breathes when she remembers how to speak again. “I knew you  _wouldn’t_ , but I have enough faith for both of us.”

You kiss her - six weeks is entirely too long a separation, and you vow never to do it again no matter _how_  necessary it is. “Everything is alright?”

“Yeah. Sephy is a month old today, and… okay, when I found out I was pregnant I was  _not_  expecting that my primary assistance during childbirth was going to be a twelve-year-old, but… we both survived, and she can sleep through anything, and… now you’re back and everything’s okay again. Everything’s okay.”

“Sephy?” you can’t help asking.

“Short for Persephone. I know we really should’ve talked about that idea, but I feel obligated to continue the Blake family tradition of terrible mythological names and-”

“I think it’s perfect,” you say, cutting her off with another kiss.

This is worth fighting for, you think as you hold your baby daughter for the first time. This would’ve been worth dying for, but this time you didn’t have to. This time you came back, this time your partner places light kisses on the latest scar on your torso when she sees it for the first time, this time everything is alright. This time, perhaps the first time in your life, you have all you’ve ever wanted.


End file.
